Four ways to protect your Excel formulas (free PDF)

If a user inadvertently changes the formulas in your Excel workbooks, all your hard work could go out the window. This ebook explains how to protect and hide those formulas so they remain safe and intact.

From the ebook:

Formulas are one of the most important components of an Excel sheet and as such, deserve—warrant—protection. You don’t want users accidentally changing formulas and impacting the purpose of your work. Fortunately, using Excel’s Protection feature, you can keep users from inflicting accidental damage. Beyond protecting, sometimes you’ll need to hide formulas altogether. Usually, you’ll do so to protect proprietary and conditional information.

The good news is that it’s easy to protect and hide Excel formulas. I’ll show you how to do so in this article.

I’m using Office 365’s Excel 2016 (desktop) on a Windows 10 64-bit system. Protection has been around for a long time though, so you can implement what you learn here in older versions. Protection is partially supported by the browser edition, but you can’t implement or disable it in the browser. There’s no demonstration file; you won’t need one. You can work with any Excel data.

Let’s begin with a warning
It’s important to clarify the difference between protection and security. Excel protection isn’t a security feature. Protection is meant to prevent well-meaning users from accidentally damaging your work. It won’t prevent sensitive and confidential data from falling into the wrong hands. For instance, did you know that anyone can copy data from a protected Excel sheet into another workbook or even Google Sheets to access protected data? Excel protection is lost once data is copied somewhere else. It really is that easy, so don’t make the mistake of thinking a protected sheet is secure.

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Topic:
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PDF